Cooper went to stand in front of her, but he needn’t have bothered. The intruder wasn’t there for her.
Paolo stormed through the kitchen door, reaching Cooper in three strides and taking four more to have him up against the floor-to-ceiling cabinet by his T-shirt. ‘I heard a rumour you’d slimed your way back to the surface.’
‘Paolo! Stop it!’ Emma cried, clutching at his forearm. ‘Cooper never did anything with Bridget! He’s not responsible for her breaking up with you.’
Paolo pulled his face a few inches closer. He reeked of sweat and fury. Cooper remembered the scent of violence in a man well. He probably could have fought him off in seconds. He’d lived the kind of life where he’d learnt to defend himself. Only he found he didn’t have the energy. This punch, or whatever it would turn out to be, had been a long time coming. He’d accept his due punishment. Besides, he knew what it felt like to be mad with grief for losing Bridget even though she’d never been his in the first place.
‘Paolo! What will Dad say if I have to call the police on you? That’s the last thing he needs, to have to fire his manager.’
There was a long, lingering moment. Paolo’s bloodshot eyes glittered as they bored into Cooper’s. Eventually, he stepped back, collapsing against the wall and sliding to the floor, where he shook the perspiration from his forehead and buried his head in his hands.
‘Sorry. I know you did nothing wrong. Never tried to steal her off me, and I always knew how you felt. If I’m honest, I knew she might’ve loved you back. I’m not a total idiot. But then you left, so it didn’t matter any more. And now nobody wins. Everyone’s on their own, you included.’ He paused, looking up. ‘Seriously though, marrying her sister? That was not cool.’
Cooper had to agree.
* * *
Emma
Before I knew it, July had rolled through to August. Buried in work, I managed to resist breaking out into bitter cackles and shrieking, ‘Good luck with that!’ as I handed over wedding cakes, tucking my cynicism behind warm wishes and my widest fake-smile until the spike of grief and anger began to soften into mere sadness.
I nodded along to bridal plans and dreams in my design appointments, and as the weeks went by I began to allow myself to believe in them again.
When Annie announced her pregnancy over a Sunday lunch call in early September, Greg’s hand gently resting on her perfectly flat stomach, the joy was enough to fill up another fissure in my cracked heart.
The twin faces of my twin sisters sharing the split screen as they shared snapshots of a life I could only imagine took some getting used to.
Bridget was doing okay. Working for a non-narcissistic, misogynistic or megalomaniacal professor was proving to be a nice change. Rebuilding her self-confidence, rekindling her spark and learning to love herself again would prove more of a challenge.
Sofia and Moses had signed up for fostering training, zipping through the process in record speed. For some reason, no one but them had wanted to take part in the house auction for a wreck of an ex-drug-dealing den where three people had been murdered, which also happened to be in one the most notorious, crime-riddled streets of Nottingham. The first and final bid was cheap as chips. It took no time at all for the members of the New Life Church to rip out the manky, reeking carpets and replaster the crumbling walls. One of Moses’ uncles sorted the rewiring while another showed him how to plumb in a bathroom. Paolo worked every one of his days off sanding wood and installing kitchen units, all the materials at a family discount, because, well, being part of the Donovan family had nothing to do with whether you’d ended up marrying one of them or not.
In the end, quite probably helped along by a cheque offered and accepted in the privacy of my father’s study, they had a five-bedroom home with clean white walls waiting to be covered with memories, and a playroom longing to be filled with the laughter and tantrums of the children who would need it the most.
By September, Sam was down to one crutch and one therapy session a week. Ready to return to work, Orla decided that it was about time they had another woman working in Donovan’s DIY, and somehow muscled her way in as Assistant Manager before Paolo had a chance to check her CV.
* * *
As for me, well, I ran each morning and I baked most days. I spent my occasional days off digging up an abandoned vegetable patch in the cottage garden, readying the soil for seed planting in the spring.
I strung a hammock between two birch trees, and started reading again, revelling in having an outside in which to dream and doze.
As for my evenings? I found myself needing Wednesdays more than ever. I dipped in and out of the SisterApp, like a mole poking her nose out of her hole. Over the weeks I found seeing Bridget’s bright, beaming picture beside a comment was less inclined to cause my insides to seize up. My shoulders grew slightly less hunched in automatic response to her name being mentioned.
I loved my sister. I still liked her. I missed her with an ache that burned through my bones. So, meeting up with Sofia and Orla, despite the hole on the sofa where Bridget used to be, was like a tincture to my bruised emotions.
We laughed, and ranted about my mother and worried about my father, still so frail, still so stoically stubborn.
We gossiped and remembered who we were before our family had been splintered in two. We took the pain and sorrow of disaster fake-marriages and almost-affairs and the babies who would never be born and the sisters who weren’t there to share it with us, and we dug through the wreckage and we salvaged the scraps until each of us grew stronger than before. We learned to laugh at our mistakes, because, honestly, we’d had enough of crying about them.
How did people get through life without fabulous sisters to love them and laugh with them and boot them up the backside when they needed it?
* * *
With all this loving and laughing, before we knew it, Christmas was here and Bridget was coming home. I had the seedling of an idea while rolling out marzipan for another batch of cranberry Christmas cakes. It took root inside my brain as I pounded through the frosty footpaths around my new home.
I sent a Christmas card to my youngest sister. Inside I wrote an invitation to which she said yes.
Bridget came to stay on Christmas Eve and left on New Year’s Day, and I have honestly not talked as much about so many things as I did that week. It took three days before we could speak about Cooper, and Paolo, and everything that had happened and why. Only once we had, we found we couldn’t stop. I was done with trying to keep up appearances, be the big, wise Old One who knew what she was doing.
